Sunday, February 18, 2007

My First Parsifal

The year 2006 held several
firsts for me. I visited Bayreuth for the first time and I saw
Parsifal for the first time. I saw Schingensief’s production of
Parsifal.

I had studied the libretto
before going to Bayreuth and I could imagine what a conventional
Parsifal might look like. I also knew that Schlingensief’s Parsifal
was not a conventional production as I had heard talks by members of
the NSW Wagner Society who had seen it the previous year. I had also
read several reviews. The reviews had all been bad or neutral, none
of them were positive. They had told of clutter and chaos, so as I
entered the hall I was prepared for a chaos that might detract from
the music.

Instead I saw a Parsifal that I
found profoundly moving, an experience for which I was quite
unprepared given the reviews I had read.

I was so overwhelmed by Act 1
that I wept and in the first interval I walked off by myself to
recover. Before my walk I bought an ice-cream to help the energy
recovery process. I nearly left the ice-cream queue to escape the
loud tirade of abuse the gentleman behind me was heaping on
Schlingensief and his production. The man standing in front of me
also overheard this loud commentary and commented to his wife “My
feelings exactly!” Other overheard conversations around the
Festspielhaus seemed to confirm that this was a production that
everyone had agreed to hate.

Well, not quite everyone. As I
wandered around the beautiful gardens eating ice-cream and waiting
for my emotions to stabilise I spied a group of young people on a
blanket having a picnic.

I paused as I passed them and inquired, “Are you liking the production?”

Two young female faces looked up
at me with shining eyes and nodded slowly, smiling, unsure of my
reaction.

“Oh I am so pleased someone
else liked it,” I said, “ as I have been so very moved by this
production.”

So what did I see and why did I
react so strongly?

It is true that, as I had read,
there was a lot happening on stage all the time. It is also true that
there were a great many stage props and that most of them look like
temporary building materials propped up any old way. Videos projected
onto the props and several screens showed amoeba, blood rushing
through arteries, pulsing fish and insects laying eggs. There were
rabbits both onstage and in the videos. There was so much happening
all the time at so many levels that it would be as difficult to
capture this production on film as it is to describe it with words.

The knights were black, very
black and in some sort of African like costume, as was Klingsor. (Do
they belong together somehow?). Members of the choir were dressed in
every religious costume and a few political or military ones as well
and there was a very fat dark skinned nearly naked lady who took center stage. Everyone seemed to be worshiping this fat,
dark-skinned, nearly naked lady or her image. Several times during
orchestral parts a curtain came down and the video imagery continued
on the curtain, often depicting some sort of sacrifice analogy or
nature phenomenon.

Kundry appeared in several
costumes, each of them very different, but we always knew it was
Kundry. Sometimes there were two of her. There was one Parsifal but
also a look-alike who looked and acted exactly as you would expect a
storybook Jesus Christ to act. He helped people all the time and was
generally very ‘good’.

So why was I so moved by this
chaotic multi-layered production with its unusual staging?

In order to explain my reaction
I think I must write a little about myself. I believe that people’s
reactions to music, especially Wagner’s operas, can only be
explained by their personal histories. Our reactions are informed by
what went before just as Parsifal’s understanding is informed by
his own personal history.

Schlingensief’s Parsifal
seemed to take a lot of what I have been thinking about religion and
life over these past 30 years and present it on stage. As the story
and the controlled chaos unfolded I had the feeling that someone else
had thought the thoughts that I had thought, someone had felt my
feelings and, if I were to meet him, would understand without
explanation. A rare gift.

I was brought up in a Christian
family, though not a particularly observant one, and attended a high
school run by the Anglican Church. I took the religious lessons
seriously and at 18 I decided that if what I was being taught in
religion classes was true, I should become a missionary or priest. We
were taught we were all included, we were all important. At the same
time I was a girl and therefore automatically excluded from the
church hierarchy. In response to this duplicitous message I decided
it was all a lot of tosh and left the church behind me with school.
I became a card-carrying atheist, turned off by the discrepancy
between what the church taught and how it acted. The closest thing I
came to a religious experience over the next 30 years was doing
courses to learn the Vipassana meditation technique. The course is
not religious in itself, but it does include some explanation of
Buddhist precepts. I discovered that Christian and Buddhist precepts
are very similar and that despite having become an atheist I had
lived by such precepts. They seemed like common sense rules for a
good life to me.

I had not re-read the Parsifal
libretto again before the performance as I had intended, but I speak
German so I expected to understand everything immediately. However,
when the curtain rose and Gunemanz sang to some very black people in
weird costumes it took me a while to work out that these black
African caricatures were actually the knights, keepers of the grail.
Discovering that these people were knights, even if they did not fit
the role model, gave me an immediate sense of identification. In the
same moment I also realised that many of the audience would feel the
direct opposite. They would feel that they had nothing in common with
these pitch-black people with their odd costumes and weird symbols,
would feel that their religion had been taken from them. Their
Knights should be white, male, strong and with good teeth. These
people were black, of both genders, and weird. I knew how most other
people would feel as although the church talks a lot about
inclusiveness, they would not imagine knights of the grail as black
people in plastic skirts.

If we came back to earth in 3000
years,” I thought to myself, “this is what we might see.”

Parsifal is bemused by the
grail, the weird symbols, the fat female figure everyone worships and
the priests in many costumes and when Gurnemanz asks him if he
understands what he has seen, he shrinks back and shakes his head. We
can understand his reaction because we don’t understand what is
going on either. All these odd men with their symbols, singing
aggressively to Amfortas that he should do his duty. Instead of
feeling cross with Parsifal for not understanding what he has seen,
we find we identify with his confusion.

Amfortas, dressed as a hospital
patient is despairing. We are too. We are overwhelmed by the
strangeness of it all. I was reminded of how I felt when I went back
to the church for a wedding 10 years after I left the church. I felt
the same sense of strangeness and dismay that civilised people could
worship icons and accept supernatural stories. In Parsifal the
audience was obviously feeling as I had felt. I could feel the cringe
from every corner.

Then there is Kundry. We are
comfortable with Kundry as a fallen woman. We understand the role
model and we can sympathise with her when we are feeling nice.
However, we are not comfortable with the male ‘type’ that makes
Kundry into a fallen woman. In this production every male apart from
Gunemanz either wants or abuses Kundry. The Knights think that she
hates them and they would have killed her if Gunemanz had not
protected her. Parsifal and Amfortas both want her; Klingsor rapes
her on stage. Kundry or her double in their black and white costumes
are always on the defensive. She is abused; she is despairing; she
would like to die but cannot. When Klingsor wipes blood on her slip
at the place where her legs part we understand her plight and her
despair. I doubt there is a man or woman in the audience who didn’t
recognise our society in her story. There is a collective shudder
when Kundry is shown with her bloody petticoat. We don’t want to
think about how a fallen woman actually feels but here we have no
choice. Abused, misused, despairing. She is a girl, unacceptable as a
priest, abused by those who are priests. Remembering newspaper
headlines of recent years, who wouldn’t shudder?

All though the Act 1 videos show
pictures of nature. I am a biologist and these images made me feel as
if I was back in the laboratory looking through a microscope with one
eye while observing something else with the other, a familiar feeling
for a biologist. A video maker from Bern told me later that he felt
equally at home with the video imagery. It was second nature to him
to have lots of movement and chaos and quick changes.

The video rabbits and amoeba had
the effect of continually reminding one that nature is a cycle, that
there is no life without death. Exactly the Christian message
actually but not in a form that most would recognise.

(“What were those rabbits
anyway?” one woman in the ice-cream queue asked.)

Schlingensief anticipates this
lack of understanding and presents the rabbit again and again and
finally in an inescapable way. We see a video of a dead rabbit, in
quick time, as the blowflies visit, then the carcass is eaten by
maggots. I grew up on a farm so these pictures were a life/death
reality for me, but I still found it hard to watch. I closed my eyes.
I had got the message.

When the man in the ice-cream
queue spluttered angrily that ‘this production could have been put
on 5 or 10 years ago, but not now’, I realised that many people
would be confronted by the production in ways they could not
verbalise and would have to find a way to discount what they had
seen. ‘I am above this old fashioned production,’ this man was
saying.

The second act depicted
detention centers with Kundry as boat-person cum terrorist. We could
still see her good but wounded heart though. Although this act fitted
well with the previous one, I was not so affected. I am ashamed of
our detention policy but that is not new.

In the third act Parsifal,
Amfortas and Klingsor wrangle over Kundry, underscoring the wound
that both men and women carry.

The final seconds were, for me,
a masterstroke. After the rabbit gives life to maggots we see,
through the curtain, a lighted doorway open on back stage. Light
floods through and Kingsor, Amfortas and Parsifal walk towards it
hand in hand.

That moment said to me ‘Klingsor
or priest – it is all one. Good and evil. Opposite sides of the
same coin.’

Kundry becomes the heroine. She
is shown, finally, in a confirmation veil carrying the sword, which
in this production is an enormous Sheppard’s crook. Oh the
symbolism!